Ubuntu 12.10 will include advertisements for products on Amazon. It will look like this - if you search, product suggestions will pop up. This seems like a rather slippery slope to me, and I certainly wouldn't want this on my desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere else. On the web - fine, I'm on your site, not mine - but my desktop is mine, and mine alone. Not that it matters - open source, someone will disable them. Biggest concern: does this mean my search queries get sent across the web?

"Unnecessary 3D rubbish on the desktop, plus transparency and blur effects ad nauseum, despite the fact that Linux graphics drivers suck moose. Doing fancy stuff without the framework to support it is a recipe for failure, people."

QFT. Hate to say it, but you nailed it right there. GNOME is also guilty. Maybe before fully working and fully capable open-source drivers are available for nVidia and ATI cards on Linux, Unity and GNOME will have their 2D capability and feature sets up to par with their 3D counterparts.

Why they chose to go 3D first and 2D later never made any sense to me, for the same reason you mentioned. It makes sense with Apple and Microsoft since they've got all the hardware companies in their pockets and can basically do what they want and the companies will agree, but Linux or any other open source OS? What the hell?